Hi Kevin,
The in-row LOB feature is mainly designed to save space when a text column has many short values, which is a particularly bad problem when the server uses a large page size (like 16K) as ASE would use a full 16K to store even a single bye "Y". I don't think the feature made any change in how text can be used in search arguments. i.e. you can still use LIKE and IS [NOT] NULL, but not others.
Example:
1> create table t (x text in row (8))
2> go
1> insert t values ("abc")
2> insert t values ("abcdefghijkl")
3> go
(2 rows affected)
1> select * from t where x like "%c%"
2> go
x
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
abc
abcdefghijkl
(2 rows affected)
1> select * from t where x !> "c"
2> go
Msg 257, Level 16, State 1:
Server 'redhead', Line 1:
Implicit conversion from datatype 'TEXT' to 'VARCHAR' is not allowed. Use the
CONVERT function to run this query.
Msg 306, Level 16, State 5:
Server 'redhead', Line 1:
TEXT, IMAGE and UNITEXT datatypes may not be used in a WHERE clause, except with
the LIKE expression and IS [NOT] NULL predicate on columns.